[Docs] Be clear what the relationship is with geth & other clients

[embarklabs]

[Docs] Be clear what the relationship is with geth & other clients

[gerbrand]

Embark is a thin (or otherwise set slim) wrapper around geth and web3 (javascript api of Ethereum). The geth commands including arguments are logged by embark. So using Embark is no different from using Geth or web3 directly.
Maybe this information could be made more clearly in the README.

[taoeffect]

Thanks for the reply @gerbrand. Over on Gitter @jorisbontje said:

embark uses its own datadir and network id which prevent conflicts. by default it binds to the same port as as mainchain geth (30303), you have change that to run a development chain next to the maintain; but that is simple to configure

Based on your and his replies, the answers to the questions above are still not very clear.

It's still not clear whether or not embark needs to be run only when geth is not running, for example, and it's not clear where embark stores its data.

If it's true that embark is a wrapper around geth, but somehow uses a different data dir than geth does, then that needs to be noted somewhere. Will embark cause the entire chain to be re-downloaded then? Will it download the main chain or the test net? Does that mean you don't have access to your Ether? Why is it downloading a new chain instead of using the existing one from geth?

[gerbrand]

In Embark's configuration file you can create multiple profiles, each with a separate datadir and networkid. There's a default development profile that uses a temp-dir and random networkid, so you have can have your own chain during tests/development.
You can start Geth from the command-line too with the same parameters that private (block)chain.

[iurimatias]

@taoeffect @gerbrand

embark now displays a big banner on what version of geth it's using, and underline each command

The dashboard also displays it's using geth on the services list

I agree the docs need more clarification and I'm in the process of writing a more comprehensive documentation